I had one gripe with them it's mandatory Pulse Audio. It's got issues
that make life harder for someone who uses a tts and everything I have
read on forums and postings has led me to believe that its developers
are insensitive to our needs and unwilling to dedicate some serious
time to overcome the problems we face with it.

This is true. The primary developer of PulseAudio feels that if
people with visions impairments don't like his code, we are welcome to
go elsewhere. Unfortunately, PulseAudio is being more and more mind
melded into the Ubuntu and Fedora desktops. Hackers like me can get
TTS software to work with PulseAudio, but it's a challenge.
As a person with a vision impairment, I feel quite strongly that
people like me need to accept that change is coming constantly, and
usually it's bad for a11y. In my opinion, the solution is for people
like us to band together and create fixes for the code that causes the
most trouble.
Bill